Windows 8 FTDI serial drivers

[basicchip]

There are new Windows 8 drivers for the FTDI chips, which we use for the USB dongle.

However, I don't think they are quite there yet. At least on my Dell Win 8 machine, I see a lot of permission denied errors when trying to open an FTDI serial port in both C and Tcl (which BASICtools and MakeItC use). It happens often, and normally it will eventually open, sometimes after I do a Refresh of the port list, sometimes just after I go away for a while. I don't see any such issues on the Win 7 machines I have, and actually I do not remember them when I started up my Win 8 system, so it might be some driver compatibility issue between USB and FTDI, and may have started with some automatic update on the Dell side.

Ah, the fun of being the first on your block. I had something similar happen in Win 7 on an HP machine, about every other night I would get a blue screen of death crash and complaining about something in the hibernation routine. Eventually the HP auto updates fixed the problem.

As to Win 8, the stock interface with it's tablet style is really stupid, but luckily there are ways to get around it, otherwise Win8 would be pretty horrible for doing software development. If all you do is surf the web chat with your Facebook buds, then the interface is great, but you should really being using a tablet for that stuff not a workhorse PC.

[basicchip]

So far I can't duplicate any of these issues on any Win7 or WinXP machine. And I only have 1 WIn8 machine, actually it will probably be my only one until Win8 gets a sane user interface, other than the lame tablet style. Sorry MS, but my workhorse PC is not a tablet.

Anyway if anyone else see's permission denied or error 5 on serial port open to a USB let me know. I've been communicating with ftdi tech support, and they say I'm the only one with the problem so far.